US wine giants cash in on low-carb fad

May 13, 2004

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Diageo, Sutter Home and Brown-Forman are set to market their wines as ‘low-carbohydrate’ as US authorities ease their stance on nutritional information for alcohol.

Brown-Forman, the US drinks giant, plans to unveil its new low-carb wines – One.6 Chardonnay and One.9 Merlot – next week on the back of a US$5m dollar advertising campaign. The adverts will claim that ‘Life is full of compromises. This isn’t one of them.’ The wines will be sold at US$9.99 and claim to have around half the carbohydrates of the average glass of wine.

Sutter Home, one of the United States’ most popular brands in the UK reportedly plans to market its wines as naturally low-carb. International drinks giant Diageo intends to list calorie and carbohydrate content on its bottles.

Fashionable diet programs such as the Atkins and South Beach diets initiated the craze for low-carb food which began in the US several years ago. Despite claims that the low-carb fad has already peaked, an estimated 59m Americans are on a ‘low-carb’ diet.

All this has been made possible after the US Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) announced it would allow nutritional information to be included on wine labels.

The TTB has allowed wines to call themselves ‘low carbohydrate’ if the wine provides less than 7 grams of carbohydrates per serving – which would include the majority of dry wines.

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